I've finished several projects simultaneously and I'm looking to work in an area with lots of users, but as yet few producers. Wouldn't even need to involve programming, but probably would need to be online, as I'm pretty introverted!
- Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there.
- Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/customizable for people who want to do that. Capitalize on both legs of the pareto distribution.
That all being said, if you are ambitious and talented without an all-consuming passion for software, I highly recommend you find something you can work in hardware. Since the '70s or so most industries have been basically frozen, besides computer hardware/software. Yet in the meantime materials science and engineering design has advanced considerably, both of which form the basis for innovation in new technologies. This is why SpaceX was able to build components for 10-100x cheaper than the leading suppliers in the early 2000s.
I work at a startup in nuclear fission, particularly because this tech is at <1% of its potential right now. The same could be said for many other areas.
Here's some ideas you might find interesting, that I think could work in the next decade or so: - Supersonic air travel - Electric air travel - Nano/micro-scale metallurgy and materials for industry - Biological materials - Gut/microbiome - Genetic engineering - Nuclear fission / fusion - Carbon capture - Cross-laminated timber (CLT) for construction - Indoor farming / optimizing farming in general - Synthetic meat / meat alternatives
1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients
2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area)
3. Personnel management for homecare nursing
List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to build startups in this area and there's going to be a natural onramp of capital & solutions for how to care for a radically older population are going be sorely needed.
We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway.
Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing would be domain driven stack. A quick thought experiment will be that: cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages, using cloud friendly databases, on cloud-ready operating systems and processors that are architected for heavy cloud workloads. Much like how gaming was relying on custom stack for performance (GPUs, play station, X-box, etc)
The advent of TPUs by Google is a symptom of this pattern too. Of course, personal computers with general-purpose-everything will keep existing, but the business industry will start shifting towards domain driven stack slowly and steadily for obvious reasons.
We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components" for interesting DNA-sequences. People will slowly slice together more complicated features, and freely trade organic components with each other via post. At some point in the future electronics will catch up to bioengineering, leading to better ways to make changes to DNA. We'll eventually be able to change DNA in something like a "biology IDE" and have usable components printed out the other end. After that point, our world probably won't look anything like it does today.
It won't be long before someone decides to give themselves glowing skin or super strong muscles (and people have already tried the latter!) I for one welcome our super-human overlords.
ML in movies and rendering. Deep Fakes is just an amateur's tech demo. In a few years, I expect to see render rights actually become a thing. Like, you don't act in the movie, but give a company rights to use a 3d render of you in it.
real time and full time holograms / AR. With remote work becoming a thing, I see a huge market for full 3d renders of the person presenting or even completely virtual AR work places where people check in to work. Maybe not for a decade or two, but whoever builds the flagship product will make a ton of money.
And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right".
I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines.
MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to change the fundamental assumptions we make when using software.
Here's a great talk regarding trustlessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU
One of the side effects of globalization and the internet is that it becomes more and more apparent over time when there are opportunities for asymmetric impact. And there will always be bad actors that look to take advantage of that.
This is partly because we as consumers get used to the abuses and start accepting them. Back in the 90s, the onset of email spam was something that caused a lot of indignance and active outrage. Banner ads were a huge deal, too.
But a lot of it is just from the bad actors getting more sophisticated. Including state actors that are invested in causing the breakdown of democratic norms in other countries.
So I think there will continue to be opportunity in the decentralization realm. Tools for various forms of self-governance. That could mean publishing (activitypub), hosting (ipfs), or even actual governance (decision-making and voluntary policy compliance among groups).
He proposes the following idea:
- Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation"
- Generations follow a cycle:
- There is a rebellious generation
- The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive
- The third generation is very conservative
- The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will eventually lead to a rebellion in the next generation and the cycle continues.
- Millennials are the crisis generation today
History doesn't really repeat, but it sometimes rhymes with itself. If the next generation is rebellious - and they end up being like the last rebellious generation - we are looking at 22 years of deep technological developments that will lead to the next big things in two generations from now.
Honestly - this is just an interesting way to think about the world but I wouldn't act upon it. If I was forced to place a bet on who (not what) will make it big in the next 25 years, I'd put $5 (and not a cent more) on somebody who is doing a PhD today and will get to work on deep research for a few decades.
This isn't as "up and coming" as all of the other items people are mentioning, but I'd put it on a "always increasing in popularity" trajectory due to an ever-increasing need. It's not really sexy or interesting, but there will always be a HUGE market for the things that I can do =)
I will warn people that "up and coming" tech is often fad-based and has boom and bust cycles, and personally I'd rather be working for a paycheck then waiting to win the lottery in this regard.
It may not be the biggest profit possible, but I think that if you enable 22 small worker-owned cooperatives to exist more easily somehow that's a huge karmic return on investment.
Maybe said cooperatives are software companies that work together to do contract work. I think that there are a number of places that try to match up contractors with clients, and places like Gusto work great for employees but I don't think they can handle member distributions (the IRS's term for payments a company makes to an owner versus an employee).
I'm not sure what to do to help the most exactly, but I think this kind of company is going to be increasingly important in the future. Maybe even just like an online forum for people trying to start cooperatives to discuss their common issues.
You'll learn a ton of linear algebra as a side-effect of working with quantum computing, which is the foundation of lots of other fields of computer science, like graphics and AI. I'm confident that the pool of quantum programmers is effectively zero, and I wouldn't be surprised if AI spills over into the field and causes an explosion of demand for quantum programmers. By 2024, it might be a field where you can write your own paycheck.
It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it: https://trennd.co
I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have highlighted too:
- data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics)
- everything machine learning
- meat substitutes
- alternative forms of entertainment (axe throwing/escape rooms)
AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into ARKit + Swift.
An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in. It makes little sense to ship the video streams all the way back to a cloud provider, but orgs want the capability all the same.
Why build a massive services organization when you can enable and finance a takeover by a multitude of smaller players?
- electromobility: concerting bikes, kick-scooters, cars ... this all is much easier than it seems, also has a vibrant open source culture
- demand response in electricity grids has quite a few startups (one of which I just joined) that help integrating a lot of renewables in a way that does not break grid stability
- passivhaus buildings that can save 90% of heating/cooling for 10% extra cost in construction
- storing carbon into buildings with wood/CLT
- plating trees, reforesting deserts etc
- if you really want to go long there are a few fields of microbiology that could reduce our pollution from agriculture a lot
Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.
Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, use solar and satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air.
We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk, but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]
We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation, vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric economy.
Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here: http://airminers.org
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-sustaina...
Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe.
Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest people are employed at the intersection of cognitive and computer sciences, but in the service of political and commercial interests. I'd like to see more of them on the other side of this arms race, working on our individual and societal defenses.
At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digital world.
Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your toes into AR: https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/
A few years ago there was a lot of activity around creating web frameworks that made rich UI's possible, like Cappucino, Meteor.js etc.
There may be a similar opportunity now to create a full-featured, polished offline-first framework, and then make an enterprise version and/or get acqui-hired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_(Application_Develo...
Trying to plan car-free travel routes in the US is a huge pain in the butt. If Google maps can't spit out a solution that gets you all the way to your destination, it won't tell you a partial answer.
This means piecing together information from multiple sources. I spent a lot of time checking Amtrak routes and then looking for commuter bus routes, local shuttle services and the like to find a viable route.
In the past few days, I've done some googling to try to see if there is a website that handily aggregates commuter bus route info. There doesn't seem to be such.
In Southern California, you can travel from San Diego to Victorville via commuter bus, but there is no travel site that will tell you that. You have to research all the connections yourself.
(Well, I had to. I posted it to my homeless site: https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/o...)
I have to wonder how many other places in the US actually have similar situations where you can get there via bus or other transit, assuming you can dig up the information.
Living without a car is an environmentally-friendly choice and it's hugely painful in the US, often very unnecessarily so. Serving this need could promote not only environmental goals but also serve social justice because car-free Americans are frequently poor. We make it so painful to live without a car in the US that most Americans who can afford a car have one, even if they don't really want one, with the exception of a few dense metro areas with good local transit (like New York).
* psychedelics as medicine
* gut/microbiome
iPhone-level UX for private key management.
People care about privacy, and more are willing to pay for it. There is a massive opportunity for direct monetization through cryptocurrency users, and the things you could build when this problem is solved...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-s...
There are a few devices to do this. In the UK the MyEnergi range is quite popular. They have devices to divert excess power to an electric vehicle and a electric hot water heater. However the data you can get out of them is limited - there are frequent complaints by YouTubers about this - and they require the cloud to get anything useful. Plus a full set is over £1000 - for what is effectively a CT clamp, relay and a nRF chip.
On a similar note it's impossible to control appliances like washing machines and dish washers to run during peak generation (unless you solder some wires to the control board), so they have to be started manually or set on a timer. Timers worked fine to take advantage of off-peak electricity tarrifs, but for PV they don't really work (maybe there is a cloud in the middle of the day). Ideally you want the device to know how much power is needed for each stage of the program, and pause if the available power is less than that.
> At 80,000 Hours, we do research into how people can most effectively use their careers to help solve the world’s most pressing problems.
It seems their two top priority areas that attend to a "huge, neglected, and solvable" filter are:
- Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence
- Biorisk reduction
80,000 Hours is roughly how many hours a typical person will spend working. It's an organization that answers this question: How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?
In general, climate change is the topic of the century, and with it energy generation and storage. I think intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are overvalued today. Nuclear fission has a large role to play (with SMRs for instance), hydrogen as well. Of course if we make fusion work all bets are off.
I mention it because I think there's a lot of value looking at the "no longer promising" areas and see what can still be done with those tools and pieces in innovative ways. And so few are actually doing that.
CAD / CAM is still hard. CAM especially. You have to know a great deal about materials and tools, even order of operations to help the computer build efficient tool paths. There is a lot of scope for process improvement and there are commercial opportunities to sell to job shops who would like have their engineers working more on CAD and less on CAM.
There is also potential here to make it so easy and affordable that having a 5 axis machine on your property is as common place as having a laser printer. 3D printing offers the ability to create more plastic crap you don't want, or prototype things you want made on a CNC in the future. 5 Axis CNC in the home means that you could download a mocha pot, wait a day (instead of shipping) then screw it together. Drones, motors (winding is still hard), car parts could either be downloaded or you take a video on your phone and let AI figure out the CAD / CAM.
Spend 3 to 6 months on theatre acting and you will never need asking the cold internet again for anything personal!
SigInt.
How do you protect yourself and your company from the myriad of radios and devices and BYOD policies? Can you keep up with what's talking over radio? Do you know what's secure and what's not? Do you want to not only find bad devices, but locate them in your facility?
Do you also want to detect radio attacks that originate in or out of your facility? Or, do drones disturb you?
That's what I'm working on.
Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have all of the relationships already.
Ask your children if you have any. They will be able to tell you.
- No 3rd party analytics
- No 3rd party data sharing
- GDPR for users worldwide
- Logs deleted after x days
- Clear data retention policies
- Clear process on how to communicate change on these features
Apple, Firefox, and others have started to realize that people are now taking privacy seriously and willing to pay a premium for it. And, no, security is not a acceptable form of privacy. We should not be complacent with "Trust us" platforms with out clear definitions.
I’m an environmental economist - quite a specialised field. I work with a team of software developers to embed environmental economic knowledge systems in software, which makes those knowledge systems scalable and accessible. It’s been quite an experience to lay down that knowledge - basically my life’s work -in a way which democratises its use.
This experience gives me the sense that what a developer could do is look for an expert in a field in which they are interested. The more niche the better, and partner to build a system which embeds in IT a knowledge system. I might also add that many of today’s big challenges cannot be solved from within one field of expertise, but instead require multi-disciplinary toolkits, which can also be be developed within IT systems.
There's a hell of a lot more to building and scaling voice and video than you think, and tons more parts of the world are going to "come more online" with higher-bandwidth telecommunications access in the coming decades.
New pharmaceuticals are immensely expensive to develop, but that's largely because pharma companies aren't using available data to its full potential.
Its never been easier to start a software business, which is bad for most software companies since it means that they'll have no opportunity to create monopolies.
AI-driven pharma companies are defensible since their work is much more patentable than a typical software-enabled business, and because they'll benefit from data network-effects in the long term.
One example: before we had a lack of access to information, now we have too much information to deal with and have a lack of tools to sort out unbiased objective information from the rest.
Finding new tools of thought to help society raising its average IQ and EQ might be the highest-leverage activity I can think of.
For goal N, where N is an amalgam of small processes, what can we do to isolate, automate, and optimize the process?
Everyone is hyper focused on generic ML solutions, but there's it has been a hell of a lot easier to hand-code solutions to problems in existing mid-to-large scale businesses that are looking to alleviate a process pain point. If you have the brains to determine some basic ROI ballparks, you can make back engineering hours fast if you can either increase the output of your business, or decrease the required people to accomplish that output.
There's some fields that touch upon this, like Dev-Ops, but this is a more strict definition of 'operations', in that I'm referring to the non-technical people.
The impact of this practice is amplified by two major factors; 1. Quantity of work 3. Difficulty of work
If you have high quantity of N, small optimizations are compounded across all the work centers. If you have highly difficult work, reducing the time it takes to 'handle' or 'create' output can be reduced.
This idea ties in to a fantastic book, 'The Goal' by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
Being in 'hot tech' is cool, but mastering old concepts is valuable to businesses rigid to change. As the number of established companies that leverage tech for a majority of their work grows, the need for brains that are capable of process improvement with a scalpel, rather than a chainsaw.
For all the leaps forward in NN models, I have a feeling it's at risk because of a lack of trust. It's potential may be limited if the public perceives it to be too brittle or maladaptive.
DARPA is currently trying to work on DL models that are truly interpretable. If that gets sufficient progress I think the public/regulators will be much more willing to let software control aspects of their lives than a black box
- voice - augmented reality - abstraction atop all remote controls - something next beyond the rectangular brick mobile phone - etc
$.02. Great thread to start up!
- hot areas will attract a lot of producers, so go for the boring areas (who would have guessed analyzing logs would be such an important issue?).
- Consider the essay by Chris Dixon posted here a couple of days ago that these days most big innovations start as "toys". So if you can start with something small and easy to use you may be able to get airborne.
We have a lot of different ways to interact with systems but they are all separate and relatively dumb (not context-aware). I think there is a confluence of forces that will lead to a more seamless user interaction with and between systems that will reduce the friction between app and user, app and app, and user to user. Eventually, for better or worse, a lot of the underlying differences between apps and data and modes of interactions will largely disappear to the end user.
Voice commands, AR, gesture recognition, traditional mouse and keyboard, wearables, powerful phones, laptops, bluetooth, environmental devices, smart-speakers, cloud-based microservices, data transfer and description standards, ad hoc contexts, ubiquitous fast internet, etc, coming together to have user and app interaction happen in a smooth, natural , and intelligent way. Machine learning will be at the heart of it all.
Imagine all of the progress made over the years in app-to-app interoperability jumping into meatspace.
I've been seeing a lot of companies in adjacent spaces making headway into the security domain as well—ML assisted intrusion detection and cloud-centric security tooling come to mind.
In a broader sense, I think more governments and regulatory bodies are starting to take cybersecurity much more seriously than they did in the past. GDPR and CCPA are likely the tip of the iceburg in coming year and—regulations aside—I think there is a real and pressing need for better privacy and protection in both consumer and enterprise contexts.
The problem is I'm not sure how big the market can grow or the upper bound of it.
People are making software for streamers out there but at the same time there is only so much money. All streamers are at the mercy of subscribers.
The two software that stand out are statistic/dashboard and the other is bots. As for hardware the only one that stands out is irl streaming, it's a backpack with a day worth of battery and 4 mobile data plan for high quality streaming.
I personally feel like it's a gold rush like the mobile app early days before it got saturated (remember flappy bird?). But I think the market is much smaller.
1. Digital Twin(s) -- Soon all people all around the world will have two worlds, one real and one virtual The virtual world would be like the next generation of Minecraft and people all around the world will work together on open-source projects, like what people do on Github but in a virtual n-Dimensional world
2. AI and Biotech --> See Yuval Noah Harari lectures on Youtube
3. Climate Change related activities
4. Fusion which is the next generation of renewable energy
One of the most complex areas, having lots of users, that need to be fixed, is human beings. Spend all your time to know who you are, why you are like that, and change this world starting from the most promising thing it has on it: you.
In the meantime, try to carry out activities that you like (ride your bike, walk alone or with real people). Do it disconnected from any device or social network.
Do things that make you feel real and unique, without layout, template, guidelines, best practices. Ignore any negativism (fortunately you are introverted, it should help). Recognize in every moment that you have to learn a lot. Learn a lot and repeat.
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-st...
Remember that it’s very hard to notice a « disruption » is taking place, because at the time it looks like just an evolution of something already existing.
Perhaps something that touches all of it and could be lucrative is data collection and analysis tools.
Don't be fooled by the toyness of it now. The potential for this is amazing.
I tend to program for the love of the art; not to get rich, which I guess makes me a heretic, but there you are...
I am also running a pretty growing community on that on FB (Productized Startups)
Now sensors can run nodejs or similar familiar languages, and with more capacities than a decade ago
In scale, mobile apps in 2010 and vlogging in 2014 are nothing like social media in 2004.
You can compare social media in 2004 to web searching in 1998 if you know what I mean...
Profit path = more advanced big data and exploitative mechanisms, psy-ops tooling for political power preservation, centralized power, etc (think robocop / cambridge analytica on steroids). Psychosocial path = more innovation rooted in positive psychology, complex systems, decentralization, and facilitating self-actualization (think Her / pragmatic utopia). The overlap between the two seems to be psychology and complex systems thinking, so maybe "complex systems psychology" or even "social engineering" would be solid candidates?
Complex systems psychology would essentially be the next evolution of behavioral economics, where we observe and engineer the emergence of system-level phenomena by motivating individual agents to behave in ways that are psychologically positive (or aligned with a profit/power motif of someone atop a hierarchy) for the individual parts and the whole.
Social engineering is just more the micro version of that - figuring out how to infiltrate / manipulate complex social systems and then equipping organizations with defense tactics and tooling. Maybe even anticipating the emergence of new attack vectors before they can be exploited.
For anyone interested in complex systems, Santa Fe Institute is in the middle of Week 3 of their free online course. Highly recommended.
For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are great places to start.
For anyone interested in social engineering, the SECTF is a goldmine.
TL;DR - rip the writeahead log out of databases and materialize not just SQL commands but events yourself, returning control to reality rather than systems.
Not quite sure I understand this. Is this a US thing? Is it blogging by posting videos?
Stop optimizing driving routes for food delivery, selling CPG products to poor people...start worrying about humanity! It may not pay amazingly, but at least you're doing something that has the potential to be looked back at as important as fighting Nazi Germany or Polio.
AR / VR
Automation generally but particularly in manufacturing
3D printing for manufacturing
- Privacy-focuses/Decentralized social networks
- E-Sports
- Food & Leisure
- Travel
- Climate-friendly services
I am working on an open-source implementation that is based on the fundamental idea of privacy. The consumers should have full control eventually.
For now only Google etc have all the information on us, but the great thing is that because of GDPR we see a move towards us being able to download it.
The system I am building allows us to combine data from across companies. This is huge. We are talking so much opportunity. The real challenge is making it easy for people to onboard while still providing security.
Feel free to contact me if you're more interested.
If you're reading this and you haven't tried VR yet - I can't recommend it highly enough. Particularly a higher end experience connected to a PC with tracking (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index). The lower end ones like a gear VR are fun and novel but it just isn't the same experience.
I have introduced dozens of people to VR for the first and you just can't explain it to people. Videos are no help. Trying to describe is better than nothing I guess but it just doesn't get you there. If you take anything away from this comment it would be to just try to find somewhere that you can try VR yourself and you'll understand what I'm about to say better than I could ever explain it.
The equipment available to consumers today is pretty low end compared to what is possible with prototypes / commercial systems when it comes to resolution, framerate, and other factors. There are also quality of life features that work but haven't been brought to market yet for consumers. Things like wireless for the headsets. But even with this early days tech - when you put the headset on you feel like you are being transported to a different place.
If you've tried VR you probably know what I'm talking about. There is this distinct feeling of being present in the virtual world. Remembering places in VR feels more like remembering a physical location you've been to rather than something you saw in a computer game. And VR is going to be so much more than games.
Because of this feeling of presence - going places in VR actually feels like going to a different place. Likewise, when you meet someone in VR it feels different than meeting someone in a fourm like this or even in a voice chat in a video game. It feels closer to actually being in a room with them. I think a lot of this is related to being able to see some of their body language.
Everything in VR feels like a hacked together prototype and works like one too. I like to show VR to people but I can't really recommend it to most people because it just doesn't work well enough for them to be able to fix it when various things break or settings need to be changed. Some options that I offer to them are things like PSVR or I've heard the new Oculus Quest is pretty good as a casual experience but I haven't tried it yet. But both of those route you to walled gardens that are missing a lot of the really cool stuff.
If you know the right nooks and crannies to look there are some amazing things to see and do. I'll list a couple of my favorites but the best ones all have something in common. They are a platform that allow people to make their own content. In some cases they are made that way on purpose, others it feels more like an accident of design.
Remember when the internet was a little younger and you'd find a cool or bizarre website in an irc channel or something and think "who even made this?" Well that time is back except you can't view it through a screen anymore. You have to put on an HMD and venture directly into the internet. When you take a walk through the internet what do you find? Mostly weird stuff and brief glimpses of the future - both are worthwhile.
VRChat is probably the best example of the above. Like everything in VR the interfaces are terrible and everything half works. But even through that fog you start to get an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes. In VRChat you choose an Avatar and then go to virtual worlds and meet people other people. They have default Avatars and Worlds to choose from but the best content is what people make themselves. It's a unity game and there is a shocking degree of freedom in what people can upload (content made with apps like blender or unity itself).
Copyright may as well not exist yet in VR because it's too new for anyone to know to look. So people decide to be various superheros or characters from all kinds of fiction. I once visited a world where you could choose from hundreds of Marvel and DC characters. It's not that in VRChat you can be Spiderman. It's that you can choose from dozens of spidermen from various comics and movies (the real spiderverse perhaps).
As you might expect there is a lot of anime. There are also a lot of unconventional avatars. Sometimes People choose to be a car. Or a firetruck. Or a toaster. Or an ATM Machine. Sometimes people choose to be something incredibly large like a robot towering hundreds of feet in the air. Sometimes people choose to be a tiny avatar like a mouse or an RC car.
The strange thing is that there is a sense of scale in VR. So if you are a giant robot, everyone looks small and you really do feel like you are that large. Likewise if you pick a tiny avatar everything in the world looks giant. This feeling of presence remains. A very present toaster.
For many users of VRChat the Avatars are the most compelling parts. Don't get me wrong, they are really cool. It's amazing to see some of the things that people come up with. Especially the avatars that have some sort of animation without it being obnoxious / trolling (hey I did say we were walking into the internet here). People spend hours creating these versions of their virtual selves and build in abilities to do things in game. Most of these things just boil down to character animations or sounds. Any animation or sound you want leaves a lot of room for creativity (with few limits on size, or unfortunately volume).
But to me this isn't the real draw of VRChat. The worlds are. You can look at the most popular worlds in the game in menu but I prefer the search bar (searching is one of the things that half works.) Being able to be some character from fiction or someones imagination is one thing - but being able to travel somewhere is another thing all together.
So you may find yourself in a VR bar or arcade having a conversation when someone drops a portal to another world. Some of my favorites I've been to include a recreation of the secret base containing the Stargate from the show by the same name. Once you're there you can dial the gate and walk through to find yourself walking out of a pyramid on a desert planet called Abydos. Or you may find yourself climbing into a helicopter with friends in a world of abstract and surrealist art created to go along with an album somebody made. A sort of VR music video that you can fly through to a soundtrack. Or if a helicopter doesn't suit you how about another world where you can put on a jetpack and fly through what feels like various settings on an old media player visualizer (avoid this one if you get motion sickness!). Or how about one of those rides from a theme park where they put you in a hydraulic car that doesn't move and project a "ride" onto the screen in front of you? Because yes, somehow people have put a couple of these in VR too (I like the Back To The Future one).
There are literally thousands of these worlds you can visit. It really reminds me of the old internet where you would find these amazing little things tucked away and hidden.
The community is probably closer to today's internet as far as signal to noise ratio goes. But if you're willing to look there are definitely kind and interesting people to meet as well.
VRChat is fun and interesting but it's actually not where I spend most of my time in VR.
In VR there are maybe a dozen first person shooter games to choose from. In VR shooter games kind of feel like a mix between a game and paintball or something like that. My favorite is called Pavlov VR. It is a shameless knock off of counter-strike (I mean shameless. Down to the same exact same guns, mechanics, and win conditions.) But thats ok! Because it means you can play counter-strike in VR. Which is incredibly fun. There are also Call of Duty clones, Battlefield clones, and Battle Royale games. But what makes pavlov so special is that you can upload maps, similar to VRChat. Just like VRChat it's boundless creativity.
So in addition to having all the same mechanics as counter-strike it also has all the same maps. I've been playing Dust II for years (not as long as some, never did play 1.6). But now I get to actually run around there. Same goes for maps from a lot of other games I used to play. In addition to people uploading maps they also turn them into these custom game modes that you can instantly play just by joining or starting a server. Because of this, Pavlov winds up feeling like lots of different games. There are the classic default modes but there are also lots of other game modes to try (zombies, duel servers, conversions for weapons). Some of the coop modes are fun because they are a more social experience like VRChat but there is more to do. VRChat can wind up a little boring just standing around sometimes.
Space mining.
Biohacking.
* AI and ML. Assuming Moore's law still holds in some capacity, it will be about 10 years before we have a $1000 machine that is within shooting distance of the computational power of the human brain.
* Solar. Prices are dropping exponentially which means power will become cheaper and open up whole new industries. Solar just dropped below coal and is halving about every two years. The first obvious market is solar for housing but there could be plenty of others.
* Battery technology. Hand in hand with solar, battery technology is getting better and the cost of battery power is dropping exponentially. All fields adjacent to battery technology, including power management, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc. will be bolstered by having bigger, cheaper batteries.
* DNA sequencing and synthesis. I don't think we've gotten past the $1000 whole genome sequencing number in the past couple of years, so we may be in a sequencing "winter" but this won't last and these prices will plummet exponentially. I don't have any big hope of private enterprises offering personalized health as incentives don't align and the barrier is high, so my opinion is that projects that do 'crowd sourcing' with a focus open data and open source have a higher chance of success (see OpenSNP, OpenHumans, Personal Genome Project (PGP)). How is health care transformed when I can ask 1000 other people who have the same liver enzymes whether the drug I'm considering taking has worked for them? How about when I correlate the relevant gene sequence and environmental exposure to get insight on my probability of getting some specific type of cancer?
* Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin gets a lot of hate on this community but it's been steadily appreciating in value and is the only alternative to a centralized currency. At one point during the heydays of the 2000s when the internet was just burgeoning, 'micro payments' were floated around as a way to monetize. I don't see any other alternative than something like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.
* Ubiquitous computing. Maybe the most nebulous on this list, but consider what things look like when we have 1GHz, 4 core, 2G RAM, 4G hard drive Linux boxes for less than $1. Smart homes? Smart cars? Smart clothing? After playing around with a Raspberry Pi Zero W that's a full GHz processor, multi gigs of RAM and hard disk space with Linux running for less than $20, it's clear to me we're starting to transition to a next phase in 'personal' computing.
My own heavy bias is towards free/libre/open source and I firmly believe that "open source will eat the world", but this might be my hopefulness outweighing my perception of reality. I will say that anecdotally, projects that are FOSS may not have any greater chance of initial success but tend to have a greater success at staying relevant.
Obviously what you want to focus on will depend on what resources you have access to both socially or financially. I'm also not a successful entrepreneur so all these suggestions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. I am surely going to be surprised by what new comes in the next ten years.
One final note is to keep on top of other technologies that might not look that promising but could grow into something bigger. I don't think laser cutting or 3D printing are all that promising in the short term even though I think they're cool. I also want to know more about FPGAs and VR even if their adoption might not be clear. The above list seems like it's pretty certain to be relevant in some capacity.
Then you can see that YT creators now rival TV - easily. So I believe the internet will transform in a way where an youtube channel will become something like a tv show or late night show or whatever TV equivalent from the past. People will be actively looking and subscribing to these individuals or shows on purpose and will be consuming them periodically like they did in the past with television. Hence video is the tech I'd look into and the concept of making good platform/s for creators and viewers to connect and interact(!).
Blogs are dead. FB is good only for groups(many people in one place with many interests can easily connect). Twitter is pure pollitical cancer. Instagram is just for worshipping attention whores..eh "models". Any non-mainstream social network became too singular because people who were kicked out form ms sn went there. So all in all, social networks are dead. But video, video is a medium that is too deeply rooted in humans for some reason. I guess the ease of consumption? So I stirngly believe that is the way to go. I mean, you have hundreds of streaming services nowadays...no one will be buying all of them. People still want to consume good content but TV is shite and these online stremaing service will become unafordable. So there will have to be alternatives for people and as I have mentioned, YT is cutting sharing of profits with creators(not to mention censorship), so these creators will be looking for alternative means of earning and creating and sharing.
(I didn't proof-read my response so sorry for typos, I type fast and don't have time for this)
Plus it has better optics than "AI WILL EAT YER JORBZ". In this case human in the loop ML inherently creates jobs as an essential element.
You’ve just deprecated Linux & C in the data center :-D